Friday, December 09, 2005

Foss.in - take away - II

Well, my thoughts come from the talks of Atul Chitnis and Jim Zemlin of Linux Standard Base. Here is how they put it (usual disclaimers apply)

"Consider the history of the Internet Explorer. IE 6 was the last release that happened in 1999/2000 and after that only service packs have been delivered. The web on the other hand has been changing, there is RSS, tabbed browsing, advertisements, spam, viruses, etc. Then comes along a browser called Firefox, within a few days of release 1.0, there are a few million downloads; the *NIX community has a browser they can use well. What is the end-result of this? Well there is now a new team working on IE7, with ad-blocker, tabbed browsing, better standards compliance to CSS, etc.

Who benefits from all this?

Tell me who?

The customer, the consumer. In the end, the consumer with a choice always benefits, because he/she has a choice. In the end, when the consumer has a choice - it opens up the market, benefits the consumer and the market has healthy competition."